As my loyal
More truly, ExC, because he is a man-loving man, does not love same-sex marriage.
Marriage is an inherently and inescapably opposite-sexual/familial institution. That is its nature, its uniqueness, its dignity and its necessity.
The kinds of love and connection that two men make --and I am talking about actual men, not psychologically hermaphroditic androgynes-- have their own shape and their own dignity and their own flaws. Trying to fit them into an archetypal paradigm not meant for them does them no honor. In a failure of nerve and imagination, it forces them into straight drag.
For example, it is an open secret that the great majority of male-male couples have open relationships. Just as the demand for fidelity flows from the male-female realities of marriage, so the difference between emotional and sexual exclusivity creates the usually-open form of gay "marriage."
One of the gaps in Gilles Herrada's thoughtful but basically dead-ended book is that he gives no serious attention to the masculinity of gay men, to their fundamental condition as men. He takes the drive for gay marriage as some kind of irrefutable given, rather than the poster child for a second-order "social construct."
If the point of his book is that homosexuality lacks presence and grounding in the archetypal realm, the mythic and sacred matrix out of which human life is given meaning, he seems not to notice that gay marriage is an outstanding symptom of this emptiness, not its cure.
Rather than creating male-male (and female-female) bondings from scratch (in the culinary and therefore positive meaning of the phrase), the "LGBT" thingamabob has decided to make them from a pre-mixed box.
One of the besetting sins of gay culture is its imitative and derivative tendency to ape what it has not created, to live with others' hand-me-downs. The drag queen, a male who tries to mimic a kind of femaleness that even females see as a cartoon, is the unfortunate symbol of this impasse.
As is gay "marriage."
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